SpatialBlock: Enhancing Spatial Intelligence in LVLMs via Synthetic Block-Stacking Problem

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07064v1
• Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2026 05:41:13 GMT
• Title: SpatialBlock: Enhancing Spatial Intelligence in LVLMs via Synthetic Block-Stacking Problem
• Abstract summary: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance on diverse visual tasks.<n>But their ability to reconstruct and reason about the 3D structure of the scene depicted in 2D images remains limited.<n>We propose a novel paradigm inspired by human cognitive development: learning foundational spatial skills through structured block-manipulation tasks.
• Score: 40.48570356491105
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance on diverse visual tasks, yet their ability to reconstruct and reason about the 3D structure of the scene depicted in 2D images -- referred to as spatial intelligence -- remains limited. Existing approaches attempt to address this gap by using real-scene spatial question answering datasets that require dense geometric annotations. However, constructing such labels is costly, time-consuming, and often noisy due to reliance on external perception modules. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm inspired by human cognitive development: learning foundational spatial skills through structured block-manipulation tasks. We introduce SpatialBlock-15k, a synthetic dataset of 15,000 block-stacking problems covering 3D-to-2D projection, viewpoint transformation, and structural combination. The dataset further incorporates controlled color modulation as visual cues to encourage anchor-based reasoning in visually complex conditions. Experiments demonstrate that LVLMs trained on our dataset through either direct answering or reasoning-based prediction significantly outperform baselines and generalize to real-world spatial tasks, despite the dataset's synthetic and compact nature. Code and data are available at https://github.com/rsoohyun/SpatialBlock.

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